5 ways to prepare your contact centre for Coronavirus

The outbreak of Coronavirus has caused global uncertainty, businesses are working out how to plan for the coming weeks, so we’ve put together 5 ways you can prepare your contact centre to deal with COVID-19.

5 ways to prepare your contact centre for Coronavirus

1. Business Continuity Plan

If you have a written business continuity plan (and you should) then review it with your team. Is it still fit for purpose? Are there any additional factors to consider?

2. Is Home Working Possible?

If you’re utilising a cloud based telephony solution, remote working should be possible. Your agents will need a laptop and headset to get up and running, and access to your business admin systems. Don’t expect agents to be as productive when working from home and if schools close, agents could have children at home… which leads us neatly on to…

3. Adjust Working Patterns

Consider splitting your contact centre agents into smaller teams, with different shift patterns; this way if an agent becomes ill you can hopefully contain the spread. Don’t leave treats and food out at the end of workstations and ensure meeting and training rooms, keyboards and phones are cleaned after every use.

4. Keep your team updated

Your agents will have lots of “what happens if…” questions. So let them know what to do if they get ill - don’t come into work, and what sick pay they are entitled to (this is likely to be a priority for most staff).

Share your business continuity plan with staff so they can plan ahead for working from home or new shift patterns.

5. Keep Callers Updated & Encourage Channel Shift

The quickest and easiest way to keep callers up to date is by utilising professionally recorded IVR Messages. You can use messages to encourage callers to self serve online or if their enquiry isn’t urgent call back at a later date. If you use Livechat or email support, now’s the time to start promoting these other channels, and for most agents this would be easier to do at home than taking calls (see point 2).

Do you have the correct IVR Emergency Messages to load on to your IVR Platform?

Coronavirus Contact Centre IVR Messages

High Call Volumes - Channel Shift

Welcome to [COMPANY NAME]. We’re receiving more calls than usual due to Coronavirus, which means wait times are higher than we’d like. Answers to most questions can be found on our website [YOUR WEB ADDRESS]. Please stay on the line and we’ll be with you as soon as possible.

High Call Volumes - Urgent Calls Only

Welcome to [COMPANY NAME]. We’re receiving more calls than usual and due to the Coronavirus precautions we have less team members available to take calls, which means wait times are higher than we’d like. Answers to most questions can be found on our website [YOUR WEB ADDRESS]. If your call isn’t urgent, please check the website and call back when normal service resumes.

Closed - Pandemic Message

Welcome to [COMPANY NAME]. Our phone lines are currently closed due to the Coronavirus restrictions imposed by the government. However our customer service team are available to help with all enquiries via Live Chat at [YOUR WEBSITE] dot co dot uk. We will post regular service updates to our website. Thanks for calling [YOUR COMPANY NAME]… Goodbye.

Order Your Messages Here

Coronavirus Message Pack

£195.00

Plan ahead and get your BCP messages recorded by us.

Package includes 3 messages:

1x High Call Volumes - Channel Shift

1x High Call Volumes - Urgent Calls Only

1x Closed Due to Pandemic

Quantity:

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Custom IVR Voice Message Recording Service

IVR Recordings specialises in professional voice message recordings for contact centres.

To discuss your contact centre IVR voice requirements or CX project give us a call on 0800 052 7720.

Check out Steve’s latest article on LinkedIn - Managing Customer Expectations With Phone Messages Whist Remote Working

Is your IVR driving people away?

Have you ever taken 5 minutes out of your busy day to ring your own company and navigate through your IVR from the point of view of your customers?  Have you got any idea of how your calls are being handled by your phone system and agents?  If you answered ‘no’ to either or both of those questions then it’s time you put yourself in the position of one of your callers…

Make a coffee, sit down and go through your system to see how efficient (or not) it is.

We all know how quickly things can change within a company with staff turnover, different departments, different services, different contacts…but what about the IVR?

For many business owners, once the IVR is in place it gets taken for granted – sits there doing its job quite happily, but starts to feel a little stale and unloved after a while.  To give your valued customers the service they deserve, your IVR needs to be all-encompassing but not exhaustive, informative but not monotonous. 

And that’s exactly what we can help you with.

IVR Menus should be kept to a minimum of options, ideally no more than 4 or 5 per level; nobody likes sitting on the end of a phone listening to a list of menu options for 2-minutes or more– they glaze over and just press # or 0 to speak to a human.

Speak to your agents and ask them about the demeanour of callers once they’re speaking to them.  If your call handlers are regularly faced with disgruntled, fed up callers, is there something your IVR menu can do to improve their journey through your customer service?

Self-service options are brilliant – but are yours efficient, and, more importantly, accurate?  There’s nothing more frustrating than surviving an automated Spanish Inquisition to then hear, ‘I’m sorry, there has been a problem processing your information at this time, please call back’.  They most certainly will not want to call back…so don’t even go there!

Look at your call data and act on it – it will give you vital information about caller abandonment rates, such as at what stage in the system they hung up and how long they waited before they did so.  This will help to produce a tailor-made IVR system and stop mistakes being made either from the callers’ behalf, or from your end – nobody likes to admit it, but we all make mistakes occasionally.

Would you like a second opinion?

Request your Free IVR Review…

Request your no obligation FREE Pre Agent IVR Experience Review below.

Not got an IVR system in place, no worries we can help you design the perfect caller experience call us on 0161 850 3033.

Thinking of recording your own IVR Messages in-house?

Here are 5 points to consider before recording your IVR Messages in-house...

We get a lot of ‘how hard can it be to record our own messages…?’  Well, in truth, not only can it be hard in the sense of getting the right intonations and personality in your recordings, but it can also be hard on your company’s purse strings. Recording IVR messages in-house may seem like a good idea or a cheaper option, but like most things in life, if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is!  You, or one of your valued employees, could have the best personality in the world, a first class drama degree, or just simply like the sound of their own voice, but we often find that once faced with the prospect of laying down audio in a recording studio, they don’t quite have what it takes to give the company the sound you’re looking for.

If you want to go down the route of using an employee to record your IVR messages here are five points to consider first:

1. Having a 'nice voice' is not enough; you have to know how to use it!

Professional voiceovers take years to hone their skill to enable them to know where inflections should be used in a script, while still sounding natural so the finished recording doesn’t sound forced. Unless the employee you’re considering using has this level of experience then the finished audio will not engage callers in the most positive way, so the finished messages are highly unlikely to be the same quality as using a professional voiceover.

2. How will the recording sound?

If you are going to use an employee to record your IVR Prompts, where, when and how will you do the recording? You could set up in a corner of the office or the boardroom but how much background noise is there? How long will it take to record every single prompt into the system then check over to ensure what has been recorded matches the script and is correct? When will you find the time to record? Wouldn’t you and or your employee be more productive doing your normal job, because it’s likely to take a while to record even the shortest of scripts, which brings us on to…

3. How long will the recording process take and what’s the real cost?

This fact is often overlooked. A professional voiceover will record an IVR script far quicker than an inexperienced wannabe! This means your employee could take all day to record a 500 word script correctly, something which a professional voiceover would have done in under an hour. This is compounded if you’re using a professional recording studio as you’ll be paying an hourly rate for studio hire. The longer it takes to get the script ‘in the can’ the longer the editing process will take removing all the fault starts or worse piecing together the best bits of several different takes, wastes precious studio time and costs money! So much so that the dramatic increase in studio hire costs can often outweigh the cost of hiring a professional voiceover artist in the first place.

Of course you can record at your premises but the quality will be nowhere near as good as a professional studio.

4. How often do you need updates?

Our professional voiceovers are in the studio most days so when a new IVR prompt needs recording we can usually turn it around in 24 - 48 hours. If your employee records in-house then if they’re not in the office this can delay important updates. If you’re using a recording studio, your employee will have to travel to a studio to record which increases lead times further.

5. What happens if the employee leaves the company?

At best they're unlikely to be willing or able to record new IVR prompts when needed. 

At worst they may ask for all the IVR recordings to be completely removed from the system, especially if they are moving on to a competitor.

This then creates a dilemma for you – to re-record or not to re-record? If you decide to take the plunge and re-record your entire set of messages, the aforementioned processes and stumbling blocks once more rear their ugly heads, and you will probably be left wishing you’d just bitten the bullet and recorded with a professional voiceover in the first place!

It’s also worth noting that voiceover work is probably outside the scope of an employee’s contract of employment so they may look for remuneration for their additional work.

We outlined the benefits of using a professional voiceover artist to record your IVR prompts in September last year click here to take a look.

If you have any questions or queries we’re always happy to discuss projects call us on 0161 850 3033.

Optimising recordings for use on IVR Systems

An often over looked part of the IVR recording process is mastering the finished audio.

Once the session recording has been cut up and saved as individual files, it's essential that these files are checked for accuracy; this includes checking each file against the approved IVR script, volume matching each file and them optimising for use on the IVR system. 

How we optimise IVR Messages for use on your IVR System...

Volume Matching

We volume match each IVR file so you don't geT BIG CHANGES IN SOUND LEVel when played back on your IVR system. Ensuring volume consistency across the entire system makes the whole IVR experience a much more pleasurable one. 

File Optimisation

Matching your new IVR messages to the required file specification for your IVR system is a must, otherwise the voice prompts will be too loud, too quiet or even distorted when played down the line to callers.

We've worked with a wide range of IVR systems and as long as we know the file specification we can optimise your IVR prompts to sound their best.

If you want to hear the difference a professionally recorded IVR message can make to your system then request your free demo recording today.

by Steve Hindley you can find Steve on Google+

The benefits of Professionally Recorded IVR Telephone Prompts

In business image is everything nowadays, and professionally recorded IVR messages can enhance your brand. After your website, the phone is usually the first point of contact with customers so it pays to make the right first impression.

If you’re utilising an Interactive Voice Response system, what impression is it giving callers?

The main benefits of using Professionally Recorded IVR Messages:

Experienced Voices - We hand pick only the best voice talent based on their experience and ability, the voice artists we work with have years of experience and are able to deliver consistent sounding IVR Prompts. Callers can instantly spot a professional voiceover which creates the right first impression for your company.

Consistent Sound - Our voiceovers are very good at matching their delivery style to your brand values, is able to bring your IVR Script to life and create the right mood for your telephone system. When you come to record message updates in the future your chosen voiceover will be able to match the new and old messages perfectly - your callers will never tell the difference.

High Quality Audio - Having your IVR Messages recorded in a fully soundproofed voice booth with a microphone worth over £1,000 ensures high quality sound, without distracting background noise. You might think that it’s not worth going to all that effort when the finished recordings will be used on the phone (yes you’re right the phone network doesn't provide great quality) but if you start with a recording that has background noise and is unclear, this will be magnified when listening back to it on the phone.

Professional Editing - If you record your own IVR Messages it’s usually done straight into the telephone system which means you have no editing control. What you record is what you get; there’s no chance to edit out breaths, pops, clicks and background noise, all of which are distracting for callers and doesn’t create the right impression. Audio editing requires a tuned ear and technical skills to provide a polished batch of IVR Prompts, which all match perfectly.

In short if you’re serious about attracting new customers and retaining existing ones, then taking the time and effort to improve your IVR Prompts it a must.

by Steve Hindley you can find Steve on Google+

Not all IVR Systems are customer facing

Over the past few months we have seen a rise in the number of IVR Messages being used for internal communications typically HR and IT Helpdesks.

Larger organisations with thousands of employees need to operate efficient systems for dealing with queries and an IVR system with professionally recorded IVR Messages can help internal departments control their workflow.

Professionally recording IVR Messages shows employees you've taken time to think about their experience as well as the customer experience.

by Steve Hindley you can find Steve on Google+